Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant

The global phenomenon, embraced by business worldwide and now published in more than 40 languages. This international bestseller challenges everything you thought you knew about the requirements for strategic success. Since the dawn of the industrial age, companies have engaged in head-to-head competition in search of sustained, profitable growth. They have fought for competitive advantage, battled over market share, and struggled for differentiation. Yet, as this influential and immensely popular book shows, these hallmarks of competitive strategy are not the way to create profitable growth in the future. In the international bestseller "Blue Ocean Strategy," W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne argue that cutthroat competition results in nothing but a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool. Based on a study of 150 strategic moves (spanning more than 100 years across 30 industries), the authors argue that lasting success comes not from battling competitors, but from creating "blue oceans"untapped new market spaces ripe for growth. Such strategic moves, which the authors call value innovation, create powerful leaps in value that often render rivals obsolete for more than a decade. "Blue Ocean Strategy" presents a systematic approach to making the competition irrelevant and outlines principles and tools any company can use to create and capture their own blue oceans. A landmark work that upends traditional thinking about strategy, this bestselling business book charts a bold new path to winning the future. Published by Harvard Business Review Press."

Congratulations are in order for friend of the company Marshall Goldsmith, one of the really good guys in this business, on winning the 2011 Thinkers50 Leadership Award as the World’s Most-Influential Leadership Thinker.
Now sponsored by the Harvard Business Review, The Thinkers50 is a decade-old, biannual global ranking of management thinkers that uses ten criteria to rank thinkers: originality of ideas; practicality of ideas; presentation style; written communication; loyalty of followers; business sense; international outlook; rigor of research; impact of ideas and the elusive guru factor. Goldsmith has all of those qualities in spades, ranked number seven on the overall Thinkers50 list and was certainly deserving of the award in Leadership he took home.
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It's an admittedly worn device to use the alphabet to organize one's thoughts, but when reflecting over the past decade and trying to distill the most notable events and objects that affected our company and also the publishing industry and business sector into a brief blog post, I found such a device to be quite helpful. As Jack put it when we initially discussed writing a decade-in-review post, not only is it like opening a can of worms, it seems like whenever one harkens back to the Millenium, one can't help but get sidetracked into thoughts about 9/11. But of course there were many more ups and downs that we've all been a victim and/or a participant in, and this list is an attempt to do that chaos a little bit of justice.
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A few weeks ago, Fred Wilson from avc. com kicked up interest in books that entreprenuers should read. Fred, in particular, made the point that "there is way more insight to be gained from stories than from business books.
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Channel Insider recently posted a slide show of 21 Must Read Books for Business Success. It was compiled by asking "successful solution providers what books have both inspired them and shaped their approach to making their businesses a success. " You can get detailed descriptions of the books by viewing the slide show, but the list itself, with links, below.
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